


Built By A Barbarian

by 1nsomnizac



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23658025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1nsomnizac/pseuds/1nsomnizac
Summary: An agent of the Radch describes her experience working on a space station construction crew
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12
Collections: Republic of Two Systems Independence Day Exchange 2020





	Built By A Barbarian

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gostaks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gostaks/gifts).



> For the Republic of Two Systems Independence Day Exchange, for gostalks whose prompt read: Technology/science worldbuilding! What does construction look like in the Radch? Where are the scientists and engineers? I'd love to see a station being built, an AI core being made, or a look at how a civilization that can build a dyson sphere gets "normal things" done.

Deiku is not civilized. I mean this, intentionally, in both senses of the word. It is outside The Civilization, outside the Radch. It is also a place of impropriety, of cruelty, of bitterness. It’s a place built by barbarians.

I did not always have this attitude. I turned down an opportunity to transfer away from the posting about a year ago. The culture fascinated me. It still does really, but it does not enchant anymore.

Hm? No, it wasn’t losing my hand that soured the planet for me. This is the result of an accident, and an accident that I made worse with my inexperience. I imagine that I could laugh heartily at the story when enough time passes and it no longer hurts as badly.

The station under construction over the planet Deiku is the closest such structure to Omaugh that was not built by civilized enterprise. As the only undercover observer in the system with approximately relevant credentials, I received orders to join one of the crews working on the station.

People in the Deiku system measure time in eight-day weeks. Five days of work followed by three days of rest. This is truer in theory than in practice. Deiku society is dominated by a class of owners, whose power is only countered by workers organizations called unions. This contrasts with the house-based organization of our society, although there are quite a few similarities.

I joined one of these unions as an apprentice in order to get on the work crews. Getting in is not easy for the average worker; there are more positions than applications, but if I was not able to manipulate my way into organizations, I would not be an agent. Still, the techniques should not get around, so I won’t state them here. If you are supposed to know this, you already know.

The week goes like this. The day before work begins, I leave my more permanent lodgings in an urban center and drive out to the desert near the staging area which the company set up near the shuttle port. This takes all afternoon and is generally unpleasant, due to the poor quality of the vehicles which an apprentice can afford. I check into a motel for the night, and drive out to the staging area about one and a half to two hours before dawn. This means, of course, that I wake up long before this. I arrive at around half past four, well in advance of the five o’clock start time. Despite the supreme inconvenience of this arrangement, the alternative would be to leave my permanent lodgings in the middle of the night and drive four hours to the desert. The amount of money I spend for a night’s sleep is truly infuriating, but I refuse to sacrifice the few comforts of civility that I remain able to exploit. Despite the existence of labor unions, most of these workers placidly accept impositions on their lifestyle that even the Radch’s wretches would complain about.

The staging area is out in the middle of the desert, near the shuttle port. Cargo containers full of portions of the new space station’s ductwork sit in rough rows around the mobile office, a building designed to fold up until it is small enough to be carried by a shuttle or a terrestrial cargo hauler.

Once I arrive I go straight in and sign in. I’m never the first to come, and I’m never the last to come, either. I do this by design. If you arrive before the foreman, that attracts attention. If anyone has to wait for you, that attracts attention as well. A spy always stays in the middle of the pack.

Strictly speaking, we are supposed to wait until the job starts at five o’clock, and the union could kick up a stink about it if they wanted, but apparently this falls into the little valley of things which the union does not enforce on businesses. A similar valley exists wherein businesses ignore a lot of small breaches of contract on the part of workers.

Once everyone is inside, we start preparing to go up. First, the street clothes come off. I tend to wear the gender neutral, utilitarian outfit of pants and poncho. But my coworkers are almost all male citizens of the Fhai ethnic group, who make up the majority of the proletariat on this planet, and so they all wear the sleeveless black Kuume dress, the traditionally masculine garment of the Fhai, although they leave the bicep ribbons that usually go with it at home. Nothing so likely to cut off circulation goes into space.

It is distinctly uncomfortable to be the only person in the crew to not wear a dress; I can tell that they see my clothing as effeminate.

The Fhai are generally bigoted against members of the Deiku third gender and are not particularly interested in foreign ideas about gender. As such, it seemed best that I wear the unisex undergarment which the union mandates over my chest, since the mismatch between face, voice, and chest would likely result in a lot of harassment. Since the officials at the union are all Fhai themselves, and all likely to be likeminded, I would have no protection from this harassment. My coworkers do not wear their chest undergarment, even though they are supposed to do so; another rule shoved quietly into the valley. I am glad the regulation exists, though, because I can generate the impression that I wear the undergarment because I’m a stickler, rather than a freak.

On goes the emergency blowout defense garment, a thick body glove striped with even thicker ridges. Everyone calls this garment a presser. Over the presser go elbow length gloves and boots that come around halfway to the knee. Together these form a protective envelope that prevent sudden losses of atmosphere from giving a worker a fatal case of the bends. The man known as the presser comper goes over every outfit, checking that the presser seals to the boots and gloves, and making sure there are no microtears anywhere. Apprentices such as myself inevitably get microtears, and inevitably get derided for it in an almost ritualistic fashion.

After all of that, we finally put our helmets on. These helmets are not the type which just generate a field to capture air in the event of a pressure loss; these helmets are not simply for capturing air, but to protect the head. They are thick and heavy and take time to learn how to use correctly. On my first spacewalk, I kept exhaling into the wrong place and misting up my visor. The presser comper makes sure it attached to the neck of my presser correctly. Then air reservoirs are attached at the back. Then we put on our tool belts. Then, finally, we are ready to go up.

Some days I don’t go up, but stay down at the staging area assembling sections of duct for people to install the next day. These days are boring but sometimes welcome. But most of the time, I go up.

The skeleton of the station, the vast rings and spars of metal and plastic and stone are already in place in the section where I work, although the walls and floors are holes covered by force fields to prevent micrometeorite damage, or as my coworkers call it, taking a shotgun blast from god.

The work itself is routine; it is easier to install duct in microgravity than on the ground. The hard part is connecting the segments. The seamer, the tool which allows us to join two sections of duct, produces a lot of waste heat, which inevitably heats up the air in the region so high that only one seam can be made every fifteen minutes, even though the actual process takes two minutes at most. Before the incident, I had even got over my fear of the machine.

The incident plays in my mind again and again. I was working in one of the areas closer to the edge of construction with a man named Marda, when I saw a shuttle with the logo of one of the structural work crews get hit by micrometeorites. The shields on the shuttle were supposed to be good enough to handle that, but this time they failed. Probably the shields required more power than the shuttle had in reserve, causing them to drop, after which the rest of the micrometeorites hit, killing the pilot. You always let the generator run until your reserve power is full for just this reason, but as they say here, time is money, and it someone made a bad gamble.

The shuttle hit the shields on the station and the air in our section went out. Marda was in the middle of a seal when it happened. I saw it coming and grabbed the slack in my lifeline. Marda didn’t, and the escaping air sent him forward, still clutching the handle of the seamer, which dragged along the duct before the motion stopped. Marda was swearing over the com, and I could see that he must have hit something, because his presser had a huge gash along the shoulder. I tried to go over to him, not really thinking, and grabbed the duct to angle myself in the weightless space. I wasn’t thinking and I wasn’t looking.

The seamer had not turned off. It was still running, pumping waste heat wherever it could. Now that there was no air, that heat could only travel through conduction. The entire duct had become hot. Too hot. It burned like the sun through all the layers of glove, all the layers of skin, through the muscle and bone. I did not so much let go as stopped having fingers anymore. I blacked out, attached to my lifeline, drifting.

Marda didn’t make it. Whatever hit him weakened the seal on his air tank. It erupted and shot him into a support strut, breaking his neck. I made it only because the mass of molten plastic and scorched flesh that used to be my hand formed a passable seal.

The workman’s compensation for the hand is truly pitiful really. I’m hoping that I can get pulled back to Radch, though. I haven’t heard anything from Omaugh yet, though, but there are some distressing rumors coming through…


End file.
